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SLI issues, any help would be much appreciated

post #1 of 11
1/2/07 at 8:13pm
Thread Starter 
I purchased my M9700 with the 2x 512 7900 gs cards back in September. Since the machines arrival the SLI has not worked. I have contacted alienware about the issue and they have sent me a new SLI cable. Both Cards are good (switched them both out and run them and they both worked) and I have also reinstalled the device drivers. I then ran into a new issue with this. I reseated the SLI bridge, put in the cable and it still didn't work. So, I removed the cable and rebooted the machine. I forgot to disable SLI, now it works, without the cable, just the bridge. Before when I would have load share monitor on it would show nothing, now with just the bridge it shows a load share. So...... I put the cable (both old and new) back into machine and SLI doesn't work, no load sharing. Does anyone have any suggestions, cause alienware isn't helping at all.
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post #2 of 11
1/2/07 at 11:01pm
I have the 256mb cards and unless your cards are different, the cable is the SLI bridge, so I'm not sure what bridge you are referring to? Do the drivers give you the option to enable or disable SLI?
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post #3 of 11
1/2/07 at 11:07pm
Well, that makes no sense at all...

The m9700 uses an older version of the nforce 4 chipset and a mobo that doesn't have the extra pipelines necessary to run SLI through the motherboard, thus the cable. I don't think it possible you'd have a one off with a newer SLI chipset and mobo...

What are your benchmarks like?

And how do you know SLI isn't working? Are you getting an error message or something?

When I received my m9700, it said SLI was enabled, but the benchmarks I got were what I'd expect to see with a single card. I disabled SLI, rebooted, then re-enabled SLI and it's worked fine ever since...
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post #4 of 11
1/2/07 at 11:42pm
It can support SLI without the cable. Unfortunately, I had to run my cards this way for a couple weeks because AW forgot to send me the bridge cable. It definitely functions, but you lose about ~30-40% of the SLI performance.
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post #5 of 11
1/3/07 at 5:22pm
Thread Starter 
Yes, the bridge in this machine is located in between the GPU's under the white piece of plastic held down by two screws. Some of the systems have this piece of plastic and some don't. The SLI will work with just the bridge installed by you get a message from windows saying that the performance is maximized when you use the cable also. I have worked on it w/ tech support for most of the day and we have not fixed the problem, My Mark06 SLI score is 4989, and my Mark05 only 6165. I assume that SLI isn't working due to the fact that the load distribution bar that runs during Directx programs shows no load distribution.
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post #6 of 11
1/3/07 at 9:42pm
Ah, I see. How very strange. With a 3dmark05 score of that number, it doesn't appear to be utilizing SLI. Are you able to enable or disable it within the nvidia control panel? Does it even give you the option?
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post #7 of 11
1/4/07 at 9:59am
Thread Starter 
Yes, made sure that the SLI was enabled and even the load sharing to see that it was and nothing. It's really depressing because I've done everything that Alienware has told me, change card locations, reinstall drivers, reinstall OS......... and so on and so on. The told me yesterday that it was due to the system age, that a Mark05 score of 10k is on a virgin system and that now it's 4 months old and thats the cause. Talk about upset.
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post #8 of 11
1/4/07 at 12:29pm
It sounds like a definite hardware issue if you've covered all the bases, and it sounds like you have. I'd demand to have the laptop replaced or at least send it in to be worked on.
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post #9 of 11
1/4/07 at 2:07pm
Thread Starter 
Woot!! Working now, Mark05 score 0f 9987 after more work with support. Done a second OS install and put new cable/bridge in and everything is fine.
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post #10 of 11
1/4/07 at 3:35pm
Great news... That's a great score.
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post #11 of 11
1/4/07 at 4:50pm
Nice! So did you replace the hardware bridge, the cable, or both? Regardless, I'm glad it's working. I'm still a little curious though as to what specifically was causing your problems. Did support hypothesize?
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